I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison for the demise of Solaris, on which Cantrill had worked, but by the time Ellison acquired the failing Sun, Solaris, cool technology and all, had been pretty much dead or dying for a while -- at the hands of Linux, and not much helped by the Sun attitude. Cantrill was furious and blamed Ellison of being monomaniacal about making money ("don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison," he said) but perhaps it was Cantrill who was monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market. Then again, luck plays such an important role in these things that nice narratives rarely give the whole picture.